Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova (17 page)

Nina
hadn’t minded me sleeping with her friend Seda, so I expected her to be fine when I told her I wanted to be with Dara again. She was calm when she said okay, but looked pissed off. I should have known jealousy would take over and not to underestimate a woman’s emotions. In hindsight I figured out that Nina didn’t mind me sleeping with Seda once because Seda was less attractive than she was – but Dara was a smoking hot girl with Playboy boobs, and only nineteen years old.

I
went over to the Internet café to make a Skype call to my Russian girlfriend Julia, who I’d neglected a bit over the past weeks. She was in tears for nearly an hour as we talked. When I returned to the deck, everything had changed.  The girls were in a panic. Communication with Cambodian girls was already hard but now they were shouting and screaming at me.

This
is what had happened, according to eyewitnesses:

Nina
and Dara got into an argument over who could stay with me, and some of the girls had badmouthed me, including Soriya who was still pissed off that I’d banged a lot of other girls when she left for Sihanoukville. Remember, these were freelance hookers who could make money every night, but they were fighting over a guy who wouldn’t pay them anything for many days of company. Apparently things got heated up and Nina lost it. Suddenly, for some unknown reason, she jumped into the filthy disgusting lake and disappeared.

The
girls went crazy and four Nigerian guys jumped in to search for her, but they couldn’t find her. When they got out of the water, some of them had lost their jewelry, along with a mobile phone. A few minutes later I walked back into the guest house and people tried to explain what happened to me.

The
n one of the girls saw that the light in my room was on and I went in, where I found Nina lying on the floor, dripping wet and not responding or saying anything to me. I yelled to the still-panicked girls that she was in my room and closed the door behind me. She must have swum under the wooden deck and climbed into my room through the window. I tried to ask her what happened but she just stared in front of her. I reckoned she must have used some drugs stronger than just weed. She had me told that she used some “ice” sometimes, but I told her I didn’t want to hear about it and told her not to use that shit. Apparently she didn’t listen.  At one point while I was trying to get her to respond I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and found Dara and a girl named Rosie there, asking about Nina. They were angry for being scared that Nina could have drowned.  I went into the corridor to calm them down, closing the door behind me.

Suddenly
the door opened again and Nina came out shouting something. She started arguing with Dara in Cambodian. All I could understand were the words Neil and “long hair” (I was called that there some times), and then it happened.

Nina
punched Dara really hard in the face. You could hear the punch land It could have been a knockout blow but Dara kept standing and grabbed Nina. They immediately started kicking and punching at each other. I tried to separate them but they were holding each other’s hair and were all strangled up. By now the whole guesthouse was watching, including all the foreigners. Some guys working at the guesthouse ran over and violently beat both girls until they let go. I jumped in because one of the guys was really giving it to them. Dara walked off crying and Nina was crying in the corner of the room. I told the staff I would take care of it and closed the door. I dragged Nina into the bathroom, took off her clothes and tried to wash and fix her up a bit. Her face was bruised from the beating the staff gave her. It all went super fast: the whole fight took less than half a minute. The staff came back and wanted to kick her out, but I bribed them with five dollars and said she would leave in the morning.

What
the hell had I got myself into? I had some thinking to do.

I
told Nina to stay in the room and went outside to see what was happening there. Outside the guesthouse I found a crying Dara. Even though she had fairly dark skin I could see that her eye was blackened and bruised from the hard punch Nina had given her. She was there with her sister and some friends who were all raging and waiting for Nina to come outside. I had to talk a lot to calm things down. I told them that Nina wouldn’t come out of the room because I didn’t want more fighting. They finally agreed to stop hanging about after a while. I felt really bad about what had happened, because Dara truly is not only a very sexy girl but also a sweet and honest one. Most freelancers are coldhearted bitches but she truly was a sweet girl.

The
following morning I had a serious talk with Nina. I was still angry with her, but mostly I was angry with myself for fucking things up so badly. She felt bad about it too and wanted me to have make-up sex with her but I didn’t want to. After she kept pushing, I let her give me a blowjob and leave. She was not allowed back at the guesthouse for a while.

Things weren’t exactly ideal for me either for a while.
Some guys I’d known for a while there were giving me a hard time, saying I’d gone too far. Basically they were just jealous because they didn’t get any attention themselves, but it made things a bit uncomfortable.  Then I went to the Internet café and saw that Dara had written me an email saying she didn’t want to see me again because it caused too much trouble.

I wrote her back a long, apologetic email
. I knew that if I wanted to sleep with her again, I’d have to lay it on thick, so there I was assuring her that she was the only one I loved, even if I’d done some other bad things, which I accepted were wrong.  All in very simple language, of course, to make sure she’d understand what I was saying. Then I went to my room and watched a movie to kill some time and think things over. I was wondering if she’d reply and if everything I’d said would have an effect. But I also figured that if she continued not wanting to see me again, it wasn’t going to be a disaster. The last weeks had changed everything, and I wondered why the girls suddenly liked me so much. I supposed it could have come from implementing some of the things I’d read about in those pick-up books – I’d taken some of their advice on body language and inner game – but I didn’t use their “routines or peacock tricks”, so I couldn’t be sure what it was. Something had definitely changed, though.

In
the evening things had calmed down a bit, but people were still talking about it. After night fell I saw that Dara had come to sit on the deck by the water, but I felt a bit depressed and stayed in my room. After a while Rosie came at my door and said that Dara wanted to talk with me. She had read my email and been moved by it. Things were OK again between me and her. I was happy as a clown. She stayed with me that night, and that got noticed. By the next day I was a legend around lakeside parts. I was that guy that slept with hookers for free and had them fistfight over me but still could lay them at night.

But
I’d learned my lesson. I stayed with Dara and didn’t go with any other girls, even though they now pushed themselves on me. More jealousy arose and some girls tried to split us apart. They didn’t succeed, though they tried hard.

On
one of the last nights I went out with Dara and Rosie. We hopped in a tuk tuk and went to Dara’s house first so she could change clothes. She lived in a small concrete shack with her family, it must have been two by five meters at most, including a small kitchen and bathroom, and there were six people living there. I wondered where all the money went. Dara’s older sister had done the same work for years and had an American boyfriend/money-sender, you’d expect that the family could live a lot more comfortably with all that money coming in. Their combined income must have been at least ten to fifteen times the average Cambodian salary, yet they were still crammed into that tiny building. It really is a different world out there. I’d been to Nina’s place too: she lived in a small room a short bike ride away from the Nr 9 guesthouse, and it wasn’t an improvement on Dara’s place.

Dara
stayed with me till the day my visa ran out and I had to leave the country. We said goodbye early in the morning and I went to on my way.

How
the hell did I pull this off? As you can read, I didn’t spend much money, I had no luxurious room with air-conditioning, I didn’t take girls to classy restaurants or buy them clothes or gifts. I didn’t throw money around in clubs and was stoned as fuck most of the time. The answer? I have no idea. Sometimes I still wonder myself.

Laos

On the bus to Laos I started reading a book for the first time in ages. The book, recommended to me by many people, was Paul Coelho’s
The Alchemist
. Although it was an interesting read, after all I’d heard about it I expected more from it. It was not a life-changer the way many people had told me. The real life-changing happened in the weeks before when I went from a shy regular backpacker to a womanizing bastard, and had nothing to do with that book.

I
spent some time at Don Det, one of the 4000 islands in the Mekong River. I needed some rest and enjoyed being on my own for a while. I spend one night with a German girl, but no bang. After five days I moved on to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

While I was there I decided to get things in order for going to Myanmar next.
Getting a visa at the Myanmar embassy was a major hassle for the girl I went to the embassy with but a piece of cake for me. Burma, or Myanmar as it now called, is a military dictatorship that’s a bit afraid of researchers and journalists. Since I had already seventeen pages of stamps in my passport, it was obvious I was just a traveler, but she was a different case, and they took a really long look at her. When I say it was easy for me, though, I should mention that it still took five days, during which I was stuck in this boring city. I went to the riverside bar a couple of times but except for Russian girls and Cambodian hookers, my game was still much undeveloped. Oh, how I wish to walk into that bar now, when I’m usually fearless and have pretty tight game.

It
was time to visit the big backpacker trap named Vang Vieng, a place every backpacker in South East Asia will end up at some point. When I walked off the bus I saw two English-speaking white guys walking barefoot. I don’t know what their idea was; maybe they were planning to write a book named “Around the world barefoot”, but it looked disgusting.

The
biggest reason backpackers go to Vang Vieng is the tubing down the river. It’s a debauched carnival of drunk and drugged-up 21-year-old backpackers. During the day people go tubing and get drunk at one of the many bars on the side of the river. The river and its bars have a sort of Mad Max look and when you’re there for the first time it’s fun to do. When you’re out on an inner tube, Laotian guys will throw ropes and pull you into the bar area, where loads of people are getting drunk on cheap cocktails. There were slides and zip lines, and everyone had paint on their body saying things like that they were sluts or took it up the ass. I felt old and not at ease there. It clearly wasn’t my scene. Girls would climb up the rocks or go to the bar and scream “wooohooo!!” every two minutes for the rest of the day.  After about five times you just wanted to toss a bottle at them.

At
night, all the bars were open and people got drunk over many drinking games and rounds of free drinks. I tried to pick up some girls, but the girls there had an attention span of one minute until the next woohooo and I had no verbally strong game, so I didn’t bother too much. When the bars closed people moved to the riverside bars and drank buckets of Vodka Red Bull. I got drunk here a few times but usually not too much because I hate hangovers.

There
were shitloads of restaurants in Vang Vieng, all playing the same two television shows. No matter where you went, it was either
Family Guy
or
Friends
. If I have to choose between those two I’m more of a
Friends
person, so I usually ended up in the same place. One day I made a lot of eye contact with a cute girl but she left soon after with her girlfriends. The next time I saw her she was wearing a long dress, but when she sat down her dress moved up and showed some disgustingly hairy legs. I lost my appetite immediately and gave her an obvious dirty look. She should learn to behave like a woman. It only convinced me even more that white backpacker girls are not for me. Most of them dress poorly and don’t take care of themselves, but they still walk around thinking like they’re the main prize. I ran into a similar situation in Bolivia a year later.

I
killed my time with reading some pick-up info, watching movies during the day and going out at night. Some people were really fucked up on drugs and acted crazy and made complete fools of themselves in front of everyone. I took it easy with the mushroom shakes and smoked some opium instead. The drug prices were complete rip-offs and I’d say half of the stuff was fake anyway.

I
can’t believe I stayed ten days here but I did. Like I said before I didn’t feel at ease in this scene and decided to go back to Cambodia where I would be a somebody again. Dara and Nina had both been emailing me, asking when I’d return.

I
had to go to Bangkok first, to cross the Thai/Cambodian border in the east. It was not possible to go from Laos to Cambodia without a Cambodian visa from the embassy, even though the other way around is possible. And thus began one of the worst bus rides of my trip.